Discourses in Global Political Theory

The emergence of multiple social, political, and economic crises in the twenty-first century and frustrations with liberal and Enlightenment promises, while looking at the same time for significance of their existence severely generates scholarly and everyday doubts about traditional frameworks of belonging, such as the nation, the state, democracy, or identity and associated concepts of territoriality, sovereignty, and the individual. Social sciences and the humanities have responded to these existentialist circumstances through several macro- and micro-theories that build on temporalized rather than essentializing ontologies to capture these social and political transformations. The contributors to this volume refer to these kinds of theories and discuss them looking at different empirical cases, using a plethora of methodological approaches from ethnography, to literature analysis, to policy document analysis, or discourse analysis. The individual chapters are thus guided by critiquing traditional and identifying anti-essentialist, however, inclusive narratives of belonging that help to turn being into becoming, time into temporality, history into historicity, development into genealogy, and space into liminality. Their critical engagement with identity and its replacement with notions of belonging leads, as a second common core of this collection, to considerations of the contribution of belonging as relational form of sociation to peaceful social and political relations.

Exploring Australian Aboriginal multiple modes of belonging to Country, this “cosmography” necessarily extends its descriptive work across several ontologies, in the tradition of William James” “pluriverse”, Bruno Latour’s “modes of existence”, and Isabelle Stengers’ “cosmopolitics”. Beginning with a reflective narrative introduction, the article then describes different modes of territorial belonging, including the religious, semiotic, legal, and political. The fieldwork was based in Broome, Western Australia where concepts and configurations of territorial belonging have shifted over the last fifty years, among the Aboriginal communities there, from traditional Goolarabooloo regionalism to Yawuru nationalism. The chapter concludes that traditional Indigenous territorial belonging is strong precisely because it has several ontologically different belongings operating at once, and that modernization has the effect of attenuating such territorial belonging.

This chapter compares two types of love that can allegedly emancipate others from the continued dominance and oppression of past colonial relations in order to achieve belonging to a decolonized community. Specifically, I will employ Confucianism to illustrate a kind of differential love; love that is benevolent between people who take up higher and lower social roles, in contrast to a universal love for all humanity. Benevolent love is hierarchical rather than equal, yet it is also potentially universal because all humans necessarily play roles in a certain hierarchy, with Confucianism being just one of them. Confucian love alludes to ontological equality for all, to the extent that individuals’ identities outside of their roles are free from interrogation. I will also use ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (OCTS), which is Beijing’s policy for arranging Hong Kong’s way of belonging to China (PRC), to illustrate how the differences between benevolent love and universal love mean that those who subscribe to each form of love are unable to understand each other in practical situations. Ironically, however, a benevolent love that aims to inspire everyone’s selflessness discourages the expression of any imagined intrinsic self-worth. According to the belief in benevolent love, legitimate claims to self-worth instead exist exclusively in one’s reunion with the motherland, as opposed to one’s own humanity. Among activists who insist on Hong Kong autonomy, a universal sense of solidarity develops and challenges Beijing’s pursuit of national unity. As a result of this dissonance, the incongruent emotions of Hong Kong’s belonging to China have yet to be reconciled.

The chapter discusses three contemporary Western approaches that critically problematize the questions of belonging and identity under conditions of late modernity. This discussion follows from the assumption that the desire for a sense of belonging is an anthropological constant, as well as the recognition that essentialized narratives of belonging are prone to violence and not suitable for the singularized, functionally differentiated, and pluralist societies of Western late modernity. The approaches that we critically problematize can be summarized under the keywords of “neo-communities” (Andreas Reckwitz), “functional differentiation” (Armin Nassehi), and “constitutional patriotism” (Jan-Werner Müller). After reviewing these approaches, we argue that each needs to incorporate the notion of ‘liminal space’ to either prevent tendencies of essentialization (Müller), or to be able to integrate social differentiation (Reckwitz and Nassehi). This is because such integration and respective alternative narratives provide a sense of belonging while also avoiding any form of essentialized narratives that are inevitably and violently exclusive, and as such, do not live up to the requirements of a pluralist world. The notion of liminal space proposes that the area in-between orthodox spaces (such as “the nation” or Gemeinschaft) is significant for critical narratives of belonging. Following this, we introduce the concept of transformativity in opposition to the persistent and essentializing language of identity. Both notions of liminal space and transformativity enable us to conceive of belonging under conditions of differentiation because they account for fluidity and change of society and politics.

This chapter examines the concept of autochthony in the Caucasus as both a colonial construct and an anti-colonial tool. Russian imperial discourse reinterpreted autochthony to frame the peoples of the Caucasus as primordial yet ahistorical, thereby justifying their subjugation as part of a civilizational mission. In contrast, Georgian intellectuals reappropriated the concept to assert national and regional resistance, developing competing narratives of autochthonous belonging. Through an analysis of figures such as Ilia Chavchavadze, Rapiel Eristavi, and Alexandre Kazbegi, the study explores how autochthony was redefined through civic nationalism, affective nationalism, and pan-Caucasian solidarity. While these reinterpretations challenged Russian hegemony, they also introduced tensions between inclusive political identity and exclusionary nationalist discourse. This chapter contextualizes autochthony within broader imperial and decolonial struggles, highlighting its role in shaping historical memory, national identity, and regional conflict.

This chapter considers the question of how people can conceptually transcend boundaries without actually exceeding them. This puzzle links to the debate over Western-centrism in the social sciences and International Relations (IR). Like other disciplines, IR scholars rely on the term “global” to forge a new space which can encompass rapidly diversifying scholarship. To this end, scholars are trying to weave a newly integrated narrative. However, the global is a space that each of us only imagines. This paper discusses two forms of religious pluralism: those of British-born theologian, John Hick (1922–2012) and Japanese novelist, Shūsaku Endō (1923–1996), in order to explore the possible implications of the term, ‘global.’ The former proposed to conceive of God as the Real. By contrast, the latter, aspiring to become a Catholic while retaining his Japanese-ness, imagined God as an agency rather than existence. By discussing both intellectuals, this essay suggests one way to envisage the global as a co-constructed imaginative space that never takes a concrete shape. Envisaged this way, we do not need to transcend boundaries to share a sense of belonging.

This article introduces and analyzes some of the central elements of the theoretical, ethical, and political works of the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Using his seminal work Epistemologies of the South, we aim to create a dialogue with the Chicana critic Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical framework as initially developed in her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Both De Sousa Santos and Anzaldúa, within the context of a critical decolonial approach, elaborated their respective theories compelled by the need to move away from modern paradigms and consequently acknowledge the paradigmatic condition of postmodernity. We have a particular interest in exploring deeply the proposal of both theorists in their creation of what De Sousa Santos came to name the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ This positions itself against the Modern totalizing knowledges and universalisms and as a way to escape the Eurocentric mono-culturalist monologue and thereby produce an ‘ecology of knowledge’ as a counter-epistemology. From a moderate anti-essentialist strategic position, the work of both De Sousa Santos and Anzaldúa strongly emphasizes the role of lived experience, the knowledge of indigenous peoples, and the use of hybridity/mestizaje as a way to claim knowledge and give a voice to the group that is violently silenced and excluded. Lastly, it is our intention in this paper to offer an introduction to some key points within the wide theoretical production of the critical decolonial sociologist Boaventura De Sousa Santos.

Just as many European nations in the nineteenth century, East Asian countries claim and appropriate cultural items as their own, and this phenomenon of cultural appropriation often causes national disputes as the origins of the cultures are not known due to their entangled history, geographical proximity, and even climate similarity. This research critically examines the roles of cultural institutions such as the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List and food museums amidst international cultural conflicts. The study explores how and why nations appropriate culture. It demonstrates that UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage List and food museums often exacerbate controversial debates about cultural origins, contributing to international conflicts rather than fostering peace, which contradicts their intended purpose. The authors find that cultural institutions create disputes in three ways. First, the current listing system, or how museums display cultural items, is too focused on the nation or a state rather than a broader region. Second, cultural institutions try to authenticate cultural items when the origin is unclear. Third, UNESCO and museums often select cultural items that need not be safeguarded or urgently protected. As a result, these institutions create a false urgency to preserve food items instead of enjoying them peacefully. Thus, the authors argue that cultural institutions can contribute to more conflict than peace and call for re-evaluating current listing practices and cultural promotion efforts to better support peacebuilding.